At Echo Lake

One of the most promising developments of the last year or so in indie rock has been the removal of the Grateful Dead from the blacklist. Thanks to the valiant efforts of folks like Animal Collective and Arthur magazine, your average Brooklynite is starting to wonder why they ever hated the Dead in the first place. Truth be told, there's a lot to be learned from the Dead, and plenty of bands on both coasts seem to be taking notes. There's a re-emphasis on the live experience, on finding the psychedelic space within compositions, on not fearing the improv, on passing around music in cassette form. It's as refreshing as a 1967 Morning Dew.

Woods sound very little like the Dead; few of these bands actually do. But there's something of Garcia and co. in their DNA, most markedly in the free-form excursions of their live set, where the four-piece weaves through compelling improvisational passages. But the Grateful Dead made albums too, and the country-inflected indie pop that fills At Echo Lake, their fifth full-length and possibly their best, is a worthy heir as well. Loose, shuffling, and tuneful, the abridged Woods experience sounds more like Wowee Zowee than Workingman's Dead, but it hits just the right contradictory note of tight arrangements and breathing-room playing to get that back-porch, weird America vibe.

Where previous records got distracted with lo-fi detours or lengthy workouts that didn't translate from the stage to tape, At Echo Lake is far more concise. Made up exclusively from the soft landing points that punctuate their longer live jams, it's a brisk listen, even down to its half-hour runtime. Only the brief near-instrumental "From the Horn", which sounds excised from a longer jam session, hints at the group's more exploratory and dangerous side. The rest is a sunset daydream flickering by with songs, often acoustic-based, rarely lasting longer than it takes to plant a melody in your head. The endearing nasality of Jeremy Earl's voice is sloughed off by a distorted effect on all lead and backing vocals, making the record sound like a patchy signal from a distant ham radio.

Successful as At Echo Lake may be, Woods are still more interesting live than on record-- a photo-negative of 99% of indie rock bands these days, who mostly remain content to jukebox their catalog on shuffle night after night. Adding a couple of extended jams might help make a Woods record a more accurate souvenir of the live experience, but is that really necessary? Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Grateful Dead is that the show and the album can be discrete experiences, feeding each other, but not overlapping.